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Schlagwort: Mac OS X

Are you also annoyed and tired by Spotify’s notification badge in the dock of Mac OS X? I totally was and found a simple list of instructions on apple.stackexchange.com and want to show you how to remove this „feature“.

If correctly used, notification badges are a cool thing. They notify you when an app wants your attention. Spotify abuses this feature and shows the number of pending notifications inside its app. That means: If you ever subscribed to somebodies playlist and this playlist is updated, you will be notified. Same goes for stuff like new tracks of your favorited artists. You have no control over these notifications and will always be notified. Otherusers are also annoyed by this misbehavior but nothing changes 🙁 Thats why my Spotify is mostly minimized to the background and when opened it shows this ugly notification badge in its UI:

Its annoying and always tries to steal my attention. Same goes for the Mac OS X dock icon:

Normally, you can open the system preferences and can disable the notifications. However, Spotify isn’t listed (although it uses the notification APIs of Mac OS X).

The instructions from stackoverflow write this missing entry into the notification database, so that it shows up in the list. Only after that you are allowed to disable Dock notifications:

A few years ago I bought a SSD kit for my MacbookPro 5.5. At that time I had decided to use the Intel SSD 320 separately from my HDD as independent drives. This resulted in increased performance, but I had to decide by myself what I want to place on the faster or larger drive.

With Mac OS X 10.8 Apple introduced the Fusion Drive with the new iMacs. It is based upon the Core Storage Layer of Mac OS and combines a fast SSD with the larger but slower HDD into a logical unit. Mac OS X decides what files it wants to place on the SSD and what on the HDD.

The performance is a little slower compared to my solution with single drives. However, it isproven fast enough, so I’ve decided to use it under Mavericks. For Mavericks, I’ve created a bootable USB stick so that I can start with a fresh installation.

If you want to try it out, this is the way to proceed: First of all, create a bootable backup of your system using SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner. Now you should follow the steps from this blog. I’ll add my notes and tweaks.

We’ll follow option C. But instead of booting from the Recovery Partition, we want to boot from the USB stick which you should’ve created following my other blog article linked above. This way, we are completely independent of the existing content of either SSD or HDD.

Now delete all content from the SSD and the HDD. Repartition the HDD to use 1 partition. This partition will be used to install a fresh copy of Mavericks. As you’ve destroyed all partitions on both drives, you don’t have a recovery partition on either disk. But the Mavericks installer will create a new recovery partition on the drive on which you’ve decided to install Mavericks (in this case it’s the HDD). This is an important step, as this partition needs to be outside of the logical volume created for the fusion disk. This way you are still able to boot into recovery, in case something goes wrong (you could nevertheless boot from the USB stick, which will allow access to the same recovery tools).

You will now continue with the instructions from the blog and merge the drives to one unit. This unit is now empty and can be used in a new installation run of Mavericks. This way, you’ve created a bootable Fusion Drive with a fresh installation of Mavericks. It is now your choice, if you want to clone your old installation with one of the cloning tools mentioned before. But you could also start with a fresh copy or you can use the migration assistent.

I’ve chosen a fresh copy and started from scratch. This is a good start to clean up your Mac from any unwanted old stuff. You’ve now successfully created a fusion drive on Mavericks. Your Mac will now handle all the logic for you on where to place the files. You may now also activate FileVault 2 to encrypt your Fusion Drive. Beware that the usage of BootCamp requires a separate partition on either SSD or HDD, because Windows will otherwise not boot. If you want this configuration, you may look up the details in this blog.

So you want to install OS X Mavericks on your older Mac from an USB stick. But the Mavericks installer is just an app which wants to upgrade your running Mac OS X, so you don’t have the option to start a fresh installation.

But there is an option available:

1. Download OS X Mavericks

Go to the Mac App Store and search for Mavericks or click this direct link. This will bring you directly to the Mac App Store page for Mavericks. You can download the installer, even when you are already on Mavericks:

The download will take its time to complete. If it’s finished, go to step 2. Otherwise you can skip the next part, as you have already downloaded the installer.

2. Cancel the installation

When the Mavericks installer opens, don’t continue it. Close it over the menu or press „alt+q“ to quit the installer.

3. Connect the USB stick and prepare it

Now connect your USB stick. I recommend a stick with at least 16GB space available (like this from SanDisk). This stick will be formatted, so make a backup of its content or use a dedicated one especially for this sole purpose.

Open the „Disk Utility“ and select your connected USB Stick.

Choose Partition and select 1 Partition. Set the name to „stick“. This way we can identify it better in step 4. Select „Mac OS Extended (Journaled)“ and assign the complete space to this partition:

Replace the „/Volumes/untitled“ with the name of the Volume we’ve created in step 3, e.g. „/Volumes/stick“. This command will ask for your Mac administrator password, so enter it and proceed.

Now the installer will create a bootable USB stick. You should see something like this:

[code]
Erasing Disk: 0%… 10%… 20%… 30%…100%…

Copying installer files to disk…

Copy complete.

Making disk bootable…

Copying boot files…

Copy complete.

Done.
[/code]

If you look your desktop, you should see a new volume called „Install OS X Mavericks“:

If you open it, you will see the „Install OS X Mavericks.app“ which you could now execute to perfom a normal upgrade installation. But you wanted this stick especially for the creation of new clean installation, therefore reboot your mac.

5. Boot into the installer

During the startup sound, press the „alt“ key. This will open up the boot menu selector. You can now select the Volume we’ve created. It should be a yellow symbol with an USB logo on it.

Congratulations, you’ve created a bootable Mac OS X Mavericks installer USB stick, which you could now use to create a fresh installation of Mac OS (or to create a Fusion drive).